What is Collective Intelligence Art?​

My starting point for the Nexus series of quasi-scientific collective intelligence art experiments, which started in November 2015, was Pierre Levy’s seminal work ‘Collective Intelligence - Mankind's Emerging World in Cyberspace’, which establishes a general philosophical context for CI-Art:

What is collective intelligence? It is a form of universally distributed intelligence, constantly enhanced, coordinated in real time, and resulting in the effective mobilization of skills…the basis and goal of collective intelligence is the mutual recognition and enrichment of individuals. (Levy 1997, p.13)

The ability of a CI to create art is only now realisable due to very recent developments in technology - most notably the relative ubiquity of the Internet, social media networks, collaborative media apps, such as Google Apps, and the UNU CI decision making platform (Rosenberg 2015). CI- Art is basically groups of people connected remotely via the Internet, working together in real-time, focused on the creation of art objects in the form of digital drawings and paintings. As the creator of these events, my interest is on the ‘relational aesthetic’ (Bourriaud 2002) - the interactions and relationships of the participants. The art object simply mediates the emergence of a CI focused on the creative act. My experiments suggest that CI-Art is not only possible, but also worthy of continued research as it holds the possibility of creating art micro-eutopias (realisable ‘good places’, not impossible ‘Utopia’); or, more skeptically, at least altering our perceptions of our own identity, ‘Self’, our consciousness, and relationships with others in the Information Age.

The Nexus experiments have shown that the unique qualities of every CI-Art event are due to the unique qualities of every individual that participates, but the overall effect enables something that transcends any individual, a form of artificial intelligence. In a CI there is continuous negotiation, ‘individual acts are coordinated and evaluated in real time’(Levy 1997). The CI-Art form ‘merges the negotiations, contacts, decisions, and effective actions of those involved in the continuous creation of a shared world’ (Levy 1997, p.113)

Early Nexus experiments partly involved crude democratic voting systems, but later involved collaboration with the scientist Dr. Louis Rosenberg and his collective intelligence UNU decision making platform. Rosenberg (2015) has shown that this enables ‘groups of users to answer questions in synchrony, the participants working as a unified dynamic system through real-time feedback loops…a real-time physical negotiation emerges among the members...In this way, each participant in a swarm is not expressing a singular view, but is continually assessing his own personal conviction across the range of possible options’.

The UNU platform allows the CI-Art participants to set out the parameters of their work, the ground rules of abstraction, by ‘collectively exploring the decision-space’ with a ‘real-time physical negotiation’. UNU is one part of the CI-Art equation. Interaction also occurs within the digital drawing/painting itself. For this I have been using Google Drawing and Google Docs. I particularly like these apps because I believe that CI-Art should be egalitarian; anyone, anywhere should be able to participate. Already people have freely participated that do not own a computer, but have had access to one at a local library or school.

The CI can be thought of as an AI, or global brain. The processes of the Nexus experiments reflect neuroscientist David Eagleman's conception of the workings of a single brain as a democracy ‘of multiple, over-lapping experts who weigh in and compete over different choices. There is an ongoing conversation among different factions in your brain ‘ (Eagleman 2012, p. 107 ). Similarly, in CI-Art, there is an ‘ongoing conversation’ - not with words, but actions - voting, adding lines/colours and taking away.

If we think of individual brains as part of a global network of brains, we begin to understand the possibilities for a CI-Art; ‘each of our brains operates in a rich web of interaction with one another...What we demarcate as you is simply a network in a larger network’ (Eagleman 2015, p.158). The participants in CI-Art are not physically connected to each other, but their individual neural networks are connected via the interactions shared through ‘digital hyperlinking’.

CI-Art is perhaps best understood in a ‘relational aesthetic’ framework of analysis. According to Nicolas Bourriaud, "the essence of humankind is purely trans-individual, made up of the bonds that link individuals together in social forms ...the inter-human game which forms our object"(Bourriaud 2002, p. 18). CI-Art proposes new inter-human relations, and its aesthetic is best judged by its participants, on ‘the basis of the inter-human relations which they represent, produce or prompt’. Bourriaud suggests that art as participation is to be valued more highly than art as commodity, ‘a luxury, lordly item’.In CI-Art the art object mediates the event; it is not to be thought of simply as a product or commodity. CI-Art creates a ‘social interstice’. That is, a place to learn ‘to inhabit the world in a better way’ – pooling our intellectual resources, becoming as one. CI-Art is a ‘micro-utopia of inter-subjectivity’ (Bourriaud, 2002), or as I prefer (since Utopia has long been connected with impossible dreams) - a ‘micro-eutopia’ (‘good place’).

Many questions still need to be answered (and asked) as we enter this new space, but my hope is that it will "be designated, recognized as a potential for beauty, thought, and new forms of social regulation...The true ‘great works’ remain to be accomplished within the universe of digital information and at the new sites for the emergence of collective intelligence" (Levy 1997, p.118-119)